NYAM Author Night Series - Something to Prove: A Daughter’s Journey to Fulfill a Father’s Legacy

Date: May 17, 2011
Time: 6:00 PM - 7:30 PM

The inspiring sequel to the acclaimed memoir The Ditchdigger’s Daughters.

Dr. Yvonne Thornton’s memoir The Ditchdigger’s Daughters has captured the hearts of readers everywhere since it was first published in 1995. In the book, Thornton related how her parents, a maid and a manual laborer, moved their five daughters out of the projects and insisted they persevere to become doctors in her beloved best-selling memoir. Now, she continues her journey in Something to Prove: A Daughter’s Journey to Fulfill a Father’s Legacy (January 2011, Kaplan Publishing).

In Something to Prove, Dr. Thornton reveals how she ascended to the top of her field as a physician by drawing on her father’s teachings. Despite bias and setbacks, she became the first African-American woman to be board certified in the obstetrical sub-specialty of maternal-fetal medicine. Dismissed and shunned by her peers for entering the white, male-dominated world of academic medicine, Dr. Thornton relied on her father’s life lessons, which taught her to be strong and rise above adversity. Though intelligence, determination, and hard work, Dr. Yvonne Thornton overcame the odds to reach the pinnacle of her profession.

No episode of ER or Grey’s Anatomy could equal the drama Dr. Yvonne Thornton experienced saving the life of a young mother who couldn’t stop bleeding, delivering a baby who had developed outside the womb, or performing a Caesarean on a patient who required two operating tables. The prototype of today’s working mother, she accomplished all of this then raced home to be there for the piano recitals and chess tournaments of her own two children.

When Dr. Thornton attended the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University in 1970, just 5 percent of specialists in obstetrics and gynecology were women. Today, 70 percent are women – a 1,300 percent increase, according to the American Medical Association. In 2005, the Association of American Medical Colleges reported that for the first time in history women made up the majority of medical school applicants (50.4 percent) and African-American women applicants increased by 10 percent over the previous year to 1,900 – exceeding male African-American applicants by 62 percent.
 
Women doctors have arrived and Dr. Yvonne Thornton – and her three sisters who are all doctors – were among the pioneers who made it possible.
 
Double board-certified in obstetrics-gynecology and maternal-fetal medicine, Dr. Thornton was consigned to the sub-basement when she began her career as an assistant professor in obstetrics- gynecology and clinic director at New York Hospital/Cornell Medical Center. The conditions she discovered in the clinic were appalling – drab, cheerless, and cold – a mirror image of the treatment she was to receive at the hands of her colleagues. Recalling the wisdom of her father who built their family home with his own two hands, Dr. Thornton reinvented her clinic, finding ways to brighten her surroundings and bring warmth, dignity and optimism to her patients.
As women physicians look toward the last hurdle – to increase the number of female doctors with full medical school professorships (currently only 12 percent), Dr. Thornton has blazed the way here, too. In 2003 she received academic appointment as a full Professor of Clinical Obstetrics and Gynecology at Weill-Cornell University Medical College.

For more information, contact Rick Ziehler at rziehler@nyam.org.

About the Speaker(s)

Yvonne S. Thornton, MD, MPH is a clinical professor of obstetrics and gynecology and board-certified specialist in obstetrics, gynecology and maternal-fetal medicine (high risk obstetrics) at New York Medical College, Valhalla, New York. She has personally delivered more than 5,000 babies in her career and has overseen or supervised more than 12,000 deliveries. She is a former Vice-Chair of a department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, and is the mother of two children.

She is the author of The Ditchdigger’s Daughters, her memoir about growing up in a poor family with parents who were determined to see all their daughters rise above their circumstances and become doctors, and Woman To Woman, a health guide that answers many questions women have about their bodies from someone who’s been on both sides of the stirrups.

During her 35-year career in medicine, she has conducted research at The Rockefeller University, the National Institutes of Health Pregnancy Research Branch, National Naval Medical Center, Naval Medical Research Institute, and New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center. She is the author or co-author of more than a dozen scientific papers. She also serves as a reviewer for the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology.

She received her MD degree from Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York City and her Master of Public Health in Health Policy and Management from the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University.

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Cost: Free
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